SEO trends and practices to follow in 2017

Every website owner knows what SEO (search engine optimization) is and that its tendencieschange as rapidly as the Internet itself. So, if you want to keep your page optimized, you need to keep up with all the releases and search engine updates.

Quality news and content websites also need it more than ever. Great SEO can serve as a useful defense mechanism against the million fake news sites that are currently taking over the search index.

Website optimization is a practice that combines both skill and access to technology, and this time of the year is probably the best to start thinking about the steps to ensure online success in 2017.

AMP might be the most important SEO trend for 2017

The shift from desktop to mobile is now irreversible, and the ultimate proof is Google’s new separate mobile search index, which they announced months ago. This situation has helped the rise of Accelerated Mobile Pages (or AMPs).

The AMP protocol is open-source and allow websites to load four times faster than popular pages and use eight times fewer data, all on mobile. Google has also started to favor AMP sites over standard protocols.

Websites that load faster might make the difference, as users don’t tend to spend much time on the resulting page they click from a given Google Search.

Three SEO practices to follow (and to modify) right now.

1. Stay away from 301 redirects.

A precise experiment by Christoph C. Temper of LinkResearchTools recently showed that 301 redirects might affect SEO because they intervene directly with a website’s topical relevance.

Christoph tested some pages with 301, 302, and 307 redirects from another page of the same domain and not powered by any other links. He discovered that 301 prevented the linking page from passing any anchor text relevance from its redirecting links.

A full report on this new study will be available on his official blog very soon, he stated. SEO webmasters should subscribe to stay one step ahead.

2. Citations don’t matter that much locally.

Another study from Andrew Shotland and Dan Leibson of Local SEO Guide seems to show that citation building might be too overestimated by web developers for local businesses.

Their findings pointed out to citations being a lot less correlated to high rankings on local searches than other less-looked-at factors.

The real game changer has to do with knowing how to track the correct rankings, building the right backlinks, and keeping it as local as possible (which ensures higher placement on the results page). Webmasters can do the latter with the help of local social media ‘influencers.’

There are ways to deal with this problem, as secure websites are still desirable. Restoring referral data to an HTTP site from other HTTPS sites is a possibility, and also ensuring that a given HTTPS website passes Referral Data to non-secure links via intermediate pages.